There are two ways you could be really helpful to Sara and me right now:

If you have an iPhone, download the app and give us a 5-star review on the App Store. There's no better way to promote the app in the store than by getting lots of good reviews!

Rebroadcast this message! Especially if you have friends who are trying to conceive, or who avoid hormonal birth control for any reason. But the more people who give us a look right now, the better.

Either way, I'll be super grateful.

If you do end up downloading Selene as a result of this message, and want to keep using it, please let me know at support@daringplan.com and I'll send you a free activation code. Consider it a Grand Opening special.

Thanks, everyone! I've spent six months on this project so far, and now the rubber meets the road. If people actually start buying, then I might have a real business on my hands. It's a little frightening, like that moment when you're hanging in space at the top of the first hill on a roller coaster.

2006 March 21

Barney Glen Roald, 1943-2006

Two weeks ago now, my father's younger brother passed away after a long battle with cancer. He died surrounded by family, which was the only way he would have wanted it.

I grew up in Halifax and Glen and family lived in Vancouver, so I never saw as much of him as I should have. When I visited, he was the warmest and most welcoming uncle anyone could have; and he was not just like that for nephews. I think his favourite role was host, particularly for the legendarily huge Christmas Eve dinners served at a table extended on trestles the length of his living room.

He curled. He rebuild classic cars. He was an actor, mostly in community theatre, but he has a line in an early episode of the X-Files, and he created a character for a local Vancouver ad campaign that got famous enough to be parodied in a political cartoon. He lived his enthusiasms.

2006 February 21

Life concentrate

When I'm travelling, by 10 in the morning I can feel like it's been a full day already; I live more in a day on the road than in any four normal days. I'm back. It feels like I've been gone a month, and well earned.

Damn, but it's been too long since I've done real backpacking. Iceland reminded me of that, and this trip proved it. I had been thinking that if I couldn't take weeks that it wouldn't be worthwhile -- so wrong. It took me about a day to get into my travel headspace, and I didn't come out until I had to start juggling the last few hours to make sure I got to the airport on time. The only real downside of a short trip was the enforced lack of flexibility; I didn't have the luxury of days to play with in deciding whether I was liking a place well enough to hang around.

The travel headspace felt right and familiar; my Southeast Asian trip must have drilled me well enough that I could just slip it on again. In the grand scheme of things that wasn't that grand a voyage, only seven weeks, not hardly enough to impress a real Aussie wanderer, but four years later it still looms large for me. I certainly found my thoughts going back there often enough on this trip.

Of course, there was plenty to remind me; Mexico and Indochina are both lands of ruined pyramidal temples and teeming cities and fabulous, endless street food. I don't think I'm being idiosyncratic in being put in mind of one from the other.

For me, the intoxication of travel is a gluttony of novelty. Everything is new; I can't be soothed into somnolence by treacherous familiarity. I don't know where to find whatever I'm looking for and I don't have routines to lull me. Everything requires thought and alertness, which feed on themselves. At the peak, I'm balanced on a single wheel, rolling forward but ready for a hairpin turn at the glimpse of a stranger opportunity.

Enough overwrought prose poetry. Without further ado, a top five list of things I saw more of than I expected in Mexico:

5. Mariachis. I had sort of assumed mariachi music would be just for tourists, but not so much. I'm not educated enough to tell the difference between son and norteńa, but the music was on stereos everywhere.

4. PDA. Couldn't ride a train or walk through a park without passing necking Mexicans.

3. Hurdygurdies. Wheezing, unmusical organs, handcranked by guys in anonymous beige uniforms -- they're about every three blocks in Mexico City centro historico. They act like they might be something like the Salvation Army, but the uniforms really have no insignia to identify them at all.

2. Police. I've never been anywhere with so many men in so many varying uniforms, everything from braid, big hats and brass buttons to stencilled black body armour and pistol-grip shotguns.

2006 February 9

ˇViva Mexico!

I've been feeling I need to get out of town for a bit, so
next week I'm off for a short vacation to Mexico City and around. Has anyone here been? I'd love any offbeat suggestions of things to do or places to go.

I don't have much of a "plan", exactly, but expect to go to the Zocalo and the National Anthropology Museum and Teotihuacan, and to take a few days go out of town, possibly to Guanajuato and maybe San Miguel de Allende. fanw suggested a bullfight, and of course there is also lucha libre and futbol.

2005 December 31

Heitur pottur

There are really only two things in Iceland that are better in the winter than in the summer. One is the chance to see the Northern Lights, which obviously can't be combined with midnight sun. But 2005 is pretty much solar minimum -- that is, the quietest point of its ~11-year activity cycle -- so my odds were poor to begin with, and in any case cloudy December would still be the wrong month to pick for a trip to see aurorae. (My advice: wait until 2009 or 2010 and go someplace continental: perhaps Whitehorse or Yellowknife.)

That leaves the real reason to go to Iceland in the winter: the hot pools.

Iceland is a strange place. Geologically, it's a brand new land. It's the froth on the crest of a magma fountain, an exceptionally large mantle plume; simultaneously it is being torn raggedly in two on the fracture line between the European and American plates. Probably it is the most volcanic place on earth.

So hot water is pretty much free. You drill a well almost anywhere, pump cold water down, and it comes up boiling. In Reykjavík, it's a city utility: you connect up to both cold and hot water mains, and get it at 80 C (175 F) out of the taps. It smells rather sulfurous and will tarnish silver jewelry, but in a place where cheap hamburgers cost $15, I don't know if they even meter the hot water.

How cheap is it? Commercial farming operations grow vegetables in winter in greenhouses kept warm with geothermal steam. You drive into the valley at Hveragerđi and are met with clouds of warm fog glowing bright orange from the grow lights. They don't bother shuttering the glass -- insulation is more expensive than the heat. (Electricity is cheap, too. There are lots of places where you can get steam out of the ground hot enough to run straight in to a turbine. If they could think of more things to do with the electricity, they could generate a lot more of it. They already import aluminum ore from Australia for smelting.)

Reykjavík pipes warm water under city streets to keep them from freezing.

My guesthouse had a hot tub in the back. I don't know if they even had an insulating cover for it; as far as I could tell, they kept it warm all the time, uncovered in December, just by letting the water run.

It is so plentiful that Reykjavík creates for itself a warm-water beach by pouring millions of gallons of it into an artificial lagoon on the shores of the Greenland Sea. They call the place Nauthólsvík Geothermal Beach, and it amounts to a city-sized hot tub. I was asking a guy in a bar about it, and he declared it the worst beach in the world: the sun is not hot enough, and the black volcanic sand is coarse. But he also said that on nice weekends the place is packed; I am unpersuaded that any place full of Icelandic girls in bikinis could be that bad.

Sadly, not even Icelanders are crazy enough to keep their beach open in December.

Every town in Iceland has a year-round outdoor swimming pool kept heated to 27 C (80 F). Reykjavík has seven of them, and the city is only 120,000 people. On a cold day, great clouds tower into the sky above the city, marking not power plants, but the locations of the city pools. They all have, in addition to the regular Olympic-sized swimming pool, a series of "hot pots", heitur pottur, containing water at a range of temperatures from soothing to searing.
Where other people would use cafes or pubs, Icelanders hang out and socialize in the hot tubs; they stay open until 9 or 10 at night. I was told that people would meet at the pool for office birthday parties and such. One I was in burst into Icelandic Christmas carolling; I was left awkwardly unable to join in.

The facilities are impressive. Sometimes there are shallow kiddie pools, or water slides, or steam rooms, sun lamps and spa facilities. Laugardalslaug is an athletic complex with stadium seating. Árbćjarlaug has hiking trails. My favourite, Sundhöllin, is an old-school downtown public bath hall where you rent towels from an attendant and get your own private locking changing booth. There are rows of these booths, filling the changing area like pigeon holes. The dividing walls and benches, everything but the wooden partition doors, are permanent construction, tiled in elegant seafoam green. You enter your changing room from one side and leave into the shower area through the other; the arrangement of halls is like nothing so much as arteries and veins.

Icelanders are conservative about wearing bathing suits in hot tubs, but strict about showering naked before entering. They use no chlorine in the pools, I presume because they constantly refresh the water with new from the hot mains, and so every pool shower room has large signs from the Board of Health announcing "ATHUGIĐ! ATTENTION! ACHTUNG!" in six languages. There is a large outline of a person with the naughty bits helpfully highlighted and red arrows indicating that soap is to be applied. Shampoo is provided from sturdy gallon-sized pump dispensers on the walls.

At Sundhöllin, the pool is in a hall indoors. When I was there, no one was using it. Everyone had gone upstairs and outside to the third-floor balcony for hot pots and a sauna, swirling steam, and a view over the roofs around us. I sank into the water and watched the mid-morning, pre-dawn sky slowly changing colours to the east.

I have also uploaded some new pictures from the trip, taken by Amy. Finally, this includes a picture of the 60-m Skogarfoss waterfall, and even one with me in it.